Thick Energy, Earth Intelligence and Nicomen Falls

A vital organ of Earth intelligence is thick energy. It’s quite impervious to the machinations of artificial intelligence. Here’s some.

Nicomen Falls

Nlaka’pamux Illahie

Now for a wander through the energy form. It begins with the gaps I spoke of before, which become memory, or mind, when crossed. One then minds them, or devotes attention to them — cares for them, let’s say — and the transfer of experience begins. It is as natural as a praying mantis in the crested wheatgrass…

… because it fills any separation.

Nicola Lake After An Early Spring Blow

This filling of separation is an organic process. Only the gap is necessary for calling it forth. Here’s a complex call and response from the streets of Kelowna:

Double Double!

Note how graffiti on the wall has invited a city paint over, which invited more graffiti, which… well, lots of fun struggling for ownership. Meanwhile, the weeds have moved into the narrow gap between building and earth, and are prying them apart. They will succeed.

When this filling blocked by artificial interventions into consciousness, walls develop first size. Here are a couple examples. The first is from an alley in Vernon. It speaks of class in a way that pretty well speaks for itself. Again, note the overpainting, and the overpainting of the overpainting!

The other side of the wall is an elite, aesthetic intelligence. This example (below) is from the University of British Columbia in a gravel pit north of Kelowna. In it, nature is forced by framing within a constructed environment to become a human partnership. It’s very smart but is, really, little more than the graffiti above, except, of the course, with the addition of elite aesthetic values and theory.

You could also say that nature is up against the wall.

This separation of power on class lines can also be racial. The image below, from syilx traditional territory on the Colville Reservation at the mouth of the Okanogan River, brings native-settler violence into play, in a complex way.

Darn, Not Quite Enough Paint.

Similarly, this alley in Vernon, with its (purposefully?) misspelled Nien No Non, written on blood, sits beside a poster commemorating the “honour” of enlisting in World War I (It’s part of a series.) This misuse of street art to alienate youth from the streets of their own city has a name…

… it is a form of whirlpool, hurricane or energy called Doom.

Snowstorm Over Okanagan Lake

In its social form it is called Dumb.

Once it is degraded further, it is called a dump.

In any form, it blocks living energy and is a “Dam.”

Grand Coulee Dam

However, to recap a previous discussion slightly so we can branch out into new territory, a life that is not dumb (like Grand Coulee Dam above, which stops the Columbia River dead and makes it dumb, or mute) is wild. It wanders. It meanders, and is will.

Fences? Pshaw.

This will that moves without impedance is said to be free. “Free as a bird,” we say. “Fancy free.”

OK, Maybe Not So Free

Bound. And freedom comes from that. What, you think you’re going to do this on your own? Pshaw.

The space where it moves is a “will deor nes”, a “wild animal preserve” (and not a ‘natural’ space at all)…

The Downtown Conconully Wilderness

Former Capital of the Okanogan

…a “wilderness.” There you can while (or whittle) away the body of your time on earth by being “willful.” Remember, though, that wilderness is not a natural space but a preserve. Being willful pushes the edges of preservation, as the image from a garage for sale as a lakeview housing development in Vernon shows.

This Artwork Has Since Been Boarded Up

Take that, eh!

However, the world is not wilderness. It is not a place of free will renewed by competition with each other (Hitler tried that with his “Blood and Soil” madness. Let’s just not go there.) but of being together, of being bound, of having bonds, of hardening or setting together. Those are tree words. They represent a sense of will older than “wild” itself. it is a “Wood.”

Birch Forest in Geysir, Iceland

This “wood” is a herd of bodies, or Bäume, to use the old German word: “Beams”, “Boughs,” “Branches” and, of course, the English word for Baum, “Tree.” These individualized energy forms came before people but people named themselves after them.

Aspen Copse at Big Bar Lake

I’ll be hosting the park all of September. Do stop on by!

Once this social group, this collection of beams of light streaming out from a copse at dawn, is hardened into a wood (and from it beams transformed into wood) its power is to duplicate by filling in any gaps, and so it repeats itself as a thicket.

All Gaps Pretty Much Filled!

This focussing of a beam of energy in a diffuse filling in is known as a thickening, or, to use the German word, the energy of Dicht.

Nicomen Falls

Very Tight, Indeed.

From Dicht also come “Thicken”, “Tight” and “Thick.”

Each Chokecherry is a Thickening of an Ovary Wall.

You can say water thickens, or quickens, and salmon form from its ripples.

In German, the words for the tightness of a thicket or the watertightness of a barrel are “Dicht.” Also included is the cohesion of a water drop out of a stream of water, and the stacked stanzas of a poem, that fills in its gap with regular measure to become a thicket. The word is the same as “Teig”, or “Dough”, in English. It describes that point in the kneading of dough that it comes to life under your hands. It takes many forms, but they are all one, all fill in gaps until there are no gaps at all only the living energy that bridges them. It can be a deer in a thicket of mock orange …

… thickening weather …

Terrace Mountain Volcano in Thickening Storm

… a conscious thickening of power that brings in power stones from great distance to thicken their strength (a kind of internet of ancient days)…

Yverdon les Bains, Switzerland

… or the many figures revealed like dream in the stone of Nikomen Falls, in a continued interlocked and evolving matrix of connection, suggestion, metamorphoses and inspiration…

… or words like these, especially words like these that access these other forms of thick energy and the energies that build them. The goal of thick energy, or poetry, or Dicht, is to thicken the world, to fill the gaps until the energy is so rich it can be transmitted. We’ll talk about how that comes about next.

This is a Blog about People in Place

I am working at rebuilding human relationships to the earth, growing the global from the local and developing new environmental technologies out of close observation of the land. The land is the watershed and run of the Okanagan River in the North American West, and the Chilcotin and Columbia volcanic plateaus and basins that surround it. It is the goal of this blog to build the future now and to do it through attention to art, earth, science and beauty, so that there is, actually, a future for our children and a path for them to feel out their way to the earth should they ever find themselves in the dark. The project will lead to two book manuscripts in the summer of 2013, one on the salmon of the Okanagan River, the last major run on the Columbia system, and the other on the connection between the Manhattan Project and the political and industrial face of Eastern Washington and Southern British Columbia. They will do so within the broader context of land-based technologies, in forms that are simultaneously art and science. In this land without borders, there is no international line at the 49th parallel, cutting our country in two, and no imagined wall between settler and indigenous cultures. We are all walking together. We are all the land speaking.